Chemists explain how bubbles get into champagne

Ever wonder how all those bubbles got into the champagne? The American Chemical Society has created a video with an explanation. (See it here: http://www.bytesizescience.com/)

Unlike other wine, which undergoes one fermentation process, champagne undergoes two. Carbon dioxide gas is trapped during the second one and it dissolves into the wine and forms the bubbles.

The bubbles ascend along the length of the bottle, dragging the molecules of the carbon dioxide and about 600 other chemicals that form the aroma and flavor of the champagne. They explode off the surface as the bubbles burst.

The recipe was trial and error at first, in the mid-1600 when French Benedictine monk Dom Pierre Perignon discovered champagne, as the story goes. Some bottles had no bubble and some just exploded.

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In any case, the video cited a study published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry that says to pour champagne on an angle to retain the carbon dioxide in the wine, as opposed to pouring it down the middle of the glass.